Abstract
Coming to terms with past tyranny in the ancient democracy of Athens entailed the employment of a rigid strategy. Individual citizens were in fact forbidden to recall the past. Legally enforced amnesia became the tool for guaranteeing reconciliation among citizens and thus enabling them to live together again as a political community1 But amnesia is not thus privileged in contemporary democracies. Adam Michnik’s slogan of ‘amnestia tak, amnesia nie’ (‘“yes” to amnesty “no” to amnesia’) represents one current of thought in coming to terms with the past of communist dictatorship.2 The ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ in South Africa tried to preserve memory of the apartheid regime at the expense of what might have seemed to some to be justified retribution — by offering perpetrators ‘amnesty’ in return for their confessions. Such confessions were seen as acts of atonement. The Stockholm Declaration of 2000 made teaching the Holocaust obligatory among EU member countries, while the ‘Platform of European Memory and Conscience’ was established in 2011 as an educational project about the crimes of totalitarian regimes. Indeed, the politics of memory pervade the global community; in Continental Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, they revolve above all around colonialism, dictatorship, genocide, mass killing and the many other forms of oppression that have left deep scars on the societies that they afflicted.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
David Cohen, ‘The Rhetoric of Justice: Strategies of Reconciliation and Revenge in the Restoration of Athenian Democracy in 403 BC’, European Journal of Sociology vol. 42, no. 2 (2001), 341–42.
Vaclav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in John Keane (ed.), The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 37.
Timothy Garlton Ash, History of the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 264.
Martin Sabrow, ‘Dictatorship as Discourse: Cultural Perspectives on SED Legitimacy’, in Konrad H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), p. 208.
Cf. Jie-Hyun Lim, ‘Series Introduction: Mapping Mass Dictatorship: Towards a Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Dictatorship’ in idem and Karen Pétrone (eds), Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship. Global Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–22.
Raul Hilberg, ‘Significance ol the Holocaust’, in Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (eds), The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide (Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publication, 1980), p. 101.
Slavenka Drakulic, They Would Never Hurt a Tly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (London: Abacus, 2004).
Barbara Misztal, ‘Collective Memory in a Global Age: Learning How and What to Remember’, Current Sociology, vol. 58, no. 1 (January 2010), 27.
Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), p. 830.
Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times. A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 296.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Jie-Hyun Lim and Peter Lambert
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lim, JH., Lambert, P. (2014). Introduction: Coming to Terms with the Past of Mass Dictatorship. In: Lim, JH., Walker, B., Lambert, P. (eds) Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past. Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137289834_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137289834_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45031-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-28983-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)